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Pure Fiction

Published December 13, 2017 by lrsharma

After writing four books of literary fiction I began to see how my writing had begun to change. I began to write what I now call “pure fiction”. This is the kind of fiction which does not have even one character that has features resembling those of anyone actually living or dead. My stories began to capture life-like truths without reflecting anyone I had known or heard about. Instead, my stories began to capture people that were entirely the creations of my imagination. I felt that this kind of writing sets an author free to write exactly as a plot or character demands. When an author has a model in real life, the author is tied to the necessity of being true to the model he imitates. The model may not always turn out to be as interesting as an imagined character. I have at last found this freedom of abandoning the imitation of people I had actually known. The result of this freedom is my new book, the recently published novella, SABA & NISHA: A LOVE STORY. The book was published in September 2017.

The first draft of Saba & Nisha was ready in about fifteen days. It grew out of a mind that had excluded all else. The pouring out of what was to become the novella just did not stop until it was complete. Rather naturally, there were shifts of perspectives which made it possible for the novella to have a double-edged discourse. Though the narration is done very largely by the author, to tell a story of the current time, after a few chapters the narration shifts to a character of an earlier generation. Thus the novel acquires a kind of double vision. There are two generations that we learn about almost parallel to each other.

I scarcely realized that the two generations in the story were getting fitted into the jigsaw of the plot simultaneously. The miracle of the matter is that along with the story and plot that were getting crystallized the novella was churning out a literary thriller and a crime story that seemed to be natural parts of the creation. I have experienced a certain kind of bliss in writing Saba & Nisha: A Love Story. Was this the result of what I believe to be “pure fiction”?